One morning before the school summer holidays, when it was just Jack and I, and I was ridiculously tired from work the night before, I decided we should do a quick and easy activity to keep him entertained, without too much work from me. We had bought some water beads, having seen other people using them, and having never heard of them before, we wanted to have a go. So we set about soaking them to see what happened. Jack loved watching them grow and got very excited every time he went back to check on them and saw they were getting even bigger!
We left them overnight and we were excited to find different ways to use them.

CREATING A DINOSAUR LAND
First of all we squished them to see what that did and we talked about what they felt like. My plan had been to get outside with them, but as the weather was not so great, I suggested to Jack that we make/play something with them inside, and his idea was to put them in soil. My immediate reaction was to say no lets think of something else. But then I stopped myself as this was meant to be his choice. Then I caught sight of his toy dinosaur I had bought at the Kenilworth festival and asked if he thought we could we use them too? He thought we could!
So, we found a plastic shoe box we had been using for craft storage and went ahead and filled it 1/3 full with soil. Then we put in the dinosaurs, some shells from last summer and the water beads.

We had fun playing around with them and feeding the dinosaurs the water beads! We talked about what dinosaurs like to eat and about their teeth. We talked about how one of the shells looked like a bone.

It was a great activity for a quiet morning!
We have also used water beads in the paddling pool, for swirling about in it, for fishing out with our nets and for squishing with our toes, and we are looking forward to finding other uses for them.
Have you used water beads? What did you do with them?